The Condensed History of iaNett

Page 5: The end is near

The months that followed were a roller coaster ride and took an enormous toll on everyone who remained with the company. Emotionally, it was a difficult ordeal - good news one day, bad news the next - the whole while dealing with a company in a volatile position; an experience I never want to repeat. Facing an overwhelming tide of continuous bad news was exceptionally difficult, and going into the office soon became a chore.

Shone and I both put forth valiant efforts towards preserving the future of WSi, and even made strides in helping to reduce our parent company's debt. On the upside, around this time WSi changed it's name to iaNett and for a short while we enjoyed the notion that our little company that had begun in the corner of an apartment bedroom had now become a publicly traded company.

However, things quickly became much worse for us when our funding was halted. With no income, both Shone and I had no other choice but to negotiate our buyout in exchange for stock and options and move on to other employment.

The shell was eventually taken over by Data Fortress Group, a group of companies with a data centre at the heart of their operations. I had originally hoped that the company would re-fund the development of the search engine and it seemed like a perfect fit: they had a data centre with lots of space, redundant power and ample bandwidth. The engine was in a functional state as of late 2000 when we stopped development, but some significant development would have been required to compete with Google, who by now had clearly become the internet's predominant search engine.

Sadly, it quickly became apparent that interest in the search engine had waned, and both Shone and I had moved on to other projects by this point. The difficult memories of those troubled times cast a long shadow over any future prospects of resurrecting the project, and in time the search engine quietly slipped into obscurity.